John Irving - A Son of the Circus

The familiar figure in Dr. Daruwalla’s waiting room distracted the doctor from the story he’d imagined; among the waiting children, the tall man indeed stood out. Even seated, his military erectness immediately captured Farrokh’s attention. The taut sallow skin and the slack mouth; the lion-yellow eyes; the acid-shriveled ear and the raw pink smear that had burned a swath along his jawline and down the side of his throat, where it disappeared under the collar of Mr. Garg’s shirt—all this captured Dr. Daruwalla’s attention, too.

One look at the nervously wriggling fingers of Mr. Garg’s locked hands confirmed Farrokh’s suspicions. It was clear tc the doctor that Garg was itching to know the specific nature of Madhu’s “sexually transmitted disease”; Dr. Daruwalla felt only an empty triumph. To see Garg—guilty and ready to grovel, and reduced to waiting his turn among the crippled children—would be the full extent of the doctor’s slight victory, for Dr. Daruwalla knew, even at this very moment, that something more than professional confidentiality would prevent him from disclosing Mr. Garg’s guilt to Deepa and Vinod. Besides, how could the dwarf and his wife not already know that Garg diddled young girls? It may have been Garg’s guilt that compelled him to allow Deepa and Vinod to attempt their circus rescues of so many of these children. Surely the dwarf and his wife already knew what Farrokh was only beginning to guess: that many of these little prostitutes would have preferred to stay with Mr. Garg. Like the circus, even the Great Blue Nile, maybe Garg was better than a brothel.

Mr. Garg stood and faced Farrokh. The eyes of every crippled child in Dr. Daruwalla’s waiting room were fixed on the acid scar, but the doctor looked only at the whites of Garg’s eyes, which were a jaundice-yellow—and at the deeper, tawny lion-yellow of Garg’s irises, which offset his black pupils. Garg had the same eyes as Madhu. The doctor passingly wondered if they might be related.

“I was here first—before any of them,” Mr. Garg whispered.

“I’ll bet you were,” said Dr. Daruwalla.

If it was guilt that had flickered in Garg’s lion eyes, it seemed to be fading; a shy smile tightened his usually slack lips, and something conspiratorial crept into his voice. “So… I guess you know about Madhu and me,” Mr. Garg said.

What can one say to such a man? Dr. Daruwalla thought. The doctor realized that Deepa and Vinod and even Martin Mills were right: let every girl-child be an acrobat in the circus, even in the Great Blue Nile—even if they fall and die. Let them be eaten by lions! For it was true that Madhu was both a child and a prostitute—worse, she was Mr. Garg’s girl. There was truly nothing to say to such a man. Only a strictly professional question came to Dr. Daruwalla’s mind, and he put it to Garg as bluntly as he could.

“Are you allergic to tetracycline?” the doctor asked him.

Because he had a history of suffering in unfamiliar bedrooms, Martin Mills lay awake in his cubicle at the mission of St. Ignatius. At first he followed the advice of St. Teresa of Avila—her favorite spiritual exercise, which allowed her to experience the love of Christ—but not even this remedy would permit the new missionary to fall asleep. The idea was to imagine that Christ saw you. “Mira que te mira,” St. Teresa said. “Notice him looking at you.” But try as he might to notice such a thing, Martin Mills wasn’t comforted; he couldn’t sleep.

He loathed his memory of the many bedrooms that his awful mother and pathetic father had exposed him to. This was the result of Danny Mills overpaying for a house in Westwood, which was near the U.C.L.A. campus but which the family could rarely afford to live in; it was perpetually rented so that Danny and Vera could live off the rent. This also provided their decaying marriage with frequent opportunities for them not to live with each other. As a child, Martin Mills was always missing clothes and toys that had somehow become the temporary possessions of the tenants of the Westwood house, which he only vaguely could remember.

He remembered better the U.C.L.A. student who was his babysitter, for she used to drag him by his arm across Wilshire Boulevard at high speed, and usually not at the proper crosswalks. She had a boyfriend who ran around and around the U.C.L.A. track; she’d take Martin to the track and they’d watch the boyfriend run and run. She made Martin’s fingers ache, she held his hand so tightly. If the traffic on Wilshire had forced an uncommonly hasty crossing of the boulevard, Martin’s upper arm would throb.

Whenever Danny and Vera went out in the evening, Vera insisted that Martin sleep in the other twin bed in the babysitter’s bedroom; the rest of her quarters consisted only of a tiny kitchenette—a kind of breakfast nook where a black-and-white television shared the small countertop with a toaster. Here the babysitter sat on one of two barstools, because there wasn’t enough space for chairs and a table.

Often, when he lay in the bedroom with the babysitter, Martin Mills could hear her masturbating; because the room was sealed and permanently air-conditioned, more often he would wake up in the morning and detect that she had masturbated by the smell, which was on the fingers of her right hand when she stroked his face and told him it was time for him to get up and brush his teeth. Then she’d drive him to school, which she did in a manner of recklessness equivalent to her habit of dragging him across Wilshire Boulevard. There was an exit from the San Diego Freeway that seemed to draw out of the babysitter a dramatic catching of her breath, which reminded Martin Mills of the sound she made while masturbating; just before this exit, Martin would always close his eyes.

It was a good school, an accelerated program conducted by the Jesuits at Loyola Marymount University, which was a fair drive from Westwood. But although the traveling to school and back was hazardous, the fact that Martin Mills was first educated in facilities also used by university students seemed to have an austere effect on the boy. Befitting an experiment in early-childhood education—the program was discontinued after a few years—even the chairs were grownup-sized, and the classrooms were not festooned with children’s crayon drawings or animals wearing the letters of the alphabet. In the men’s room used by these gifted children, the smaller boys stood on a stool to pee—these were the days before there were urinals at wheelchair level for the handicapped. Thus, both at the towering urinals and in the undecorated classrooms, it was as if these special children had been granted the opportunity to skip over childhood. But if the classrooms and the urinals spoke of the seriousness of the business at hand, they also suffered from the anonymity and impersonality of the many bedrooms in young Martin’s life.

Whenever the Westwood house was rented, Danny and Vera also lost the services of the U.C.L.A. babysitter. Then—from other, unfamiliar parts of town—Danny would be the designated driver who spirited Martin Mills to his accelerated education at Loyola Marymount. Driving with Danny was no less dangerous than the trip from and to Westwood with the U.C.L.A. babysitter. Danny would be hungover at the early-morning hour, if he wasn’t still inebriated, and by the time Martin was ready to be picked up after school, Danny would have begun to drink again. As for Vera, she didn’t drive. The former Hermione Rosen had never learned to drive, which is not unusual among people who pass their teenage years in Brooklyn or Manhattan. Her father, the producer Harold Rosen, had also never learned to drive; he was a frequent limousine-user, and once—for several months, when Danny Mills had lost his driver’s license to a DWI conviction—Harold had sent a limo to take Martin Mills to school.